Journal Articles

First, some explanation about numbering:                                   

Journals are very similar to magazines, but we use the term "Journal" to distinguish the scholarly periodicals from the popular periodicals.  [A periodical is a publication that comes out on a regular basis, such as every week, every month, or every quarter.]

Each issue usually has a number and a date, for example, Issue No. 1, January 2002.  Most publishers combine the issues for one year into a Volume.  Each year the journal is published constitutes one volume, and the volumes are numbered.  We have many of our volumes of periodicals bound, so that all the issues for one volume are collected together into one book.  When you are looking for an article, look first for the journal (ours are filed alphabetically on the 2nd floor of the Library).  Then look for the Volume.  Within that volume, look for the issue number or the date, then look for the page number of your article.

Many scholarly journals use continuous pagination.  This means that they don't start over with Page 1 in each issue.  Issue 1 of each volume starts with Page 1, but other issues of the volume continue with the page numbering.  For example, if Issue 1 ends on page 210, Issue 2 will start with Page 211.  When you open a bound volume of the journal for the year, the pages will be like a book, beginning with Page 1 in January and ending with Page 999 (for example) in December.  If you see a citation that says a journal article is on pages 668-685, you can guess that they are using continuous pagination.

Now, let's look at some actual citations.